Tuesday, January 22, 2013

GDG Vienna 2012 review and 2013 forecast

We started the year 2012 as GTUG Vienna, and already in January we had our first big event, the Google Apps Script Hackathon. Gifted developers created great applications, the winning one being Gogles - running Go (the game) on Google Spreadsheet.
In our monthly meetups we had as usual interesting topics, e.g. a discussion on the salaries for programmers in Austria, presentations on Closure, Dart, Hangout API and many more, every time worth to come! Finally in May we have announced our new name, GDG Vienna - Google Developer Group Vienna. But even with the new name we are still an independent user group powered by you.
The next highlight was Google I/O Extended 2012, which this time has been for three days, including hangouts with the Vienna guys being in San Francisco.
One of the announcements of Google I/O in 2012 were Google+ Events, and we started to make the best use of them immediately.
It did not take long to announce the next big event - DevFest Vienna! In cooperation with the Java Student User Group at the TU Wien we have organized an amazing festivity for developers in mobile, cloud, social & web, including an awesome after-party powered by Cenarion and giveaways provided by Google and O'Reilly. The hackathon on Sunday gave birth to great applications, see pictures and more details on the events page.

So what is the plan for 2013? Currently we are preparing for a spring Hackathon, Google I/O Extended 2013 will be again on the agenda, for summer we are considering making an outdoor event (maybe with a campfire), and in fall we will have again DevFest Vienna.
Additionally we will continue with monthly meetups (but maybe on a different date) and some small-scale workshops on specific topics.
All this will be made possible by a new organizers team with fresh energy and enthusiasm: Gerwin Sturm, Kariem Hussein, Marc Edem, Anna Kastlunger, Thomas Bandion and Helmuth Breitenfellner.